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Updated: May 28, 2025
The Karnatak Vaibhau recalled the story of the notorious washerman who, by scandalizing Rama, had been immortalized in the Ramayana. In the same way the names of Strachey who sentenced Tilak at his first trial in 1897 and Davar would be remembered as long as history endured.
Compare the legend of a pre-British "golden age" propagated by Tilak and his disciples in the Deccan and in Bengal with the remarkable picture of the condition of Southern India at the time when the British power first appeared on the scene which was drawn by a Madras Brahman, the late Mr. Srinivasaraghava Iyangar:
"There is no sense in saying that Mr. Tilak was sentenced according to law. There was mockery of justice, not justice." It added that "if the Hindus are to suppose Mr. Tilak guilty because an English Court of Justice had condemned him, Christians will have to forswear Christ because He was crucified by a Roman Court."
Tilak, victim of his own eloquence and of the spirit of the day, was necessarily prosecuted for his inflammatory speech, and was sent to prison for eighteen months. But it is not too much to say that the unanimous feeling of educated India went with Mr. Tilak and regarded him as a martyr.
The great development of the cotton industry during the last ten years, especially in Bombay itself which has led to vast agglomerations of labour under conditions unfamiliar in India had given Tilak an opportunity of establishing contact with a class of the population hitherto outside the purview of Indian politics.
It was at one of these Sivaji celebrations in 1897 that Mr. Tilak abandoned himself to the pro-Indian and anti-British feeling, glorifying Sivaji's use of the knife upon foreigners. "Great men are above common principles of law," ... he said.
The gravity of the disturbances, however, showed the extent and the lawless character of the influence which Tilak had already acquired over the lower classes in Bombay, and not merely over the turbulent mill-hands.
On the other hand, though he proclaims himself a Nationalist, and though, on one occasion at least, when he presided over the stormy session of the Indian National Congress at Calcutta in December, 1906, which endorsed the Bengalee boycott movement, he lent the weight of his authority to a policy that was difficult to reconcile with constitutional methods of opposition, his reason and his moral sense have always revolted against the reactionary appeals to religious prejudice and racial hatred by which men like Tilak have sought to stimulate a perverted form of Indian patriotism.
In 1897, after the Tilak case already referred to, the writer on Indian affairs in The Times complained of the teaching of historical half-truths and untruths in Indian schools and colleges, instancing the partisan writings of Burke and Macaulay, and many Indian text-books full of glaring historical perversions.
Rand, an Indian civilian, who was President of the Poona Plague Committee, and Lieutenant Ayerst, of the Commissariat Department, were shot down by Damodhar Chapekur, a young Chitpavan Brahman, on the Ganeshkind road. No direct connexion has been established between that crime and Tilak. But, like the murderer of Mr.
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